I rented Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and have been playing for the last week when I get a chance. At first I found the speed of the game hard to get to use to but it is starting to grow on me. Since it a Quake game you move fast and as your character levels up you move even faster. The leveling is match specific so, unlike Call of Duty 4 where I came to the party late and was getting destroyed by people with guns I had not unlocked, each match starts off with a level playing field. While there is a single player campaign it is really the same as the multiplayer, but with everyone besides you being bots. The gameplay is all objective based, first person shooter, with 5 classes of characters to choose from. Each class has different strengths and special equipment. There is the standard soldier who shoots and blows stuff up. The medic who can go heal and revive people. The engineer that can put up automated turrets and mines. Field ops who can call in artillery and guided rockets. And finally, the covert ops that can disguise themselves as the enemy and sneak behind the enemy lines. Each class still has decent weapons to use for general attacking purposes but it is the unique equipment that sets them apart.

The game play style is similar to Frontlines: Fuel of War and Battlefield: Bad Company where your team tries to either defend or capture/destroy an objective. Once that objective is taken or destroyed then you move on to the next one. It leads to some great rock-paper-scissors battle strategies. For example, when attacking a point to destroy an objective I can take a tank in and try and blow the whole place to smithereens. The defending team then can use an engineer to counter this by setting up anti-vehicle turrets. In return the attacking team’s field ops players can use an artillery strike to take out the turret. Or an EMP grenade can be used to disable it for 30 seconds. Or a covert ops can just sneak past them and try to destroy it from behind. As you can see pretty much every attack has a counter. In larger 8v8 rooms it makes things really fun and interesting.

The problem I had was that there is no way to see all available rooms to join. Instead you search for what game type you want (or leave it set to any) and it throws you in one. I found this frustrating because it seldom put me in a mostly full room. There is an option to fill the spots in a room with bots, but the bots on medium are pretty easy to kill and on hard they get headshots on you a lot. When I did find a room of 12 or 14 people it was fun; as most of the time as we were all trying to learn the ins and outs of that maps objectives and the nuances of each class.

I’ll probably keep Enemy Territory: Quake Wars rented for a few more weeks and play some more matches to see if I can get a good feel for it but if there are not more people hosting large rooms in a week or two I’ll send it back to gamefly and try something else. Still, if anyone else is playing it and hosting a large party or room feel free to send me an invite.